Global Hospitality Company: Workday Implementation (SaaS/HCM)

As a result of having many disparate human capital management (HCM) systems, a global hospitality company with more than 36,000 employees in 36 countries was experiencing a range of human resources problems, including a lack of process transparency, an absence of self-service capabilities for employees and managers and no systematic way of transferring employees between its 80 properties worldwide.

Accenture was chosen to leverage our deep technical experience to assist with the planning, configuration and design of a Workday Core HR software implementation that was intended to harmonize the company’s HR processes and create a single HR system—and a single reference point.

The result of this major consolidation effort was to streamline the company’s business processes with extensive employee and manager self-service capabilities through enhanced transactions and reporting, and to create greater efficiencies by freeing up time and effort that could be allocated to other activities.

Business Challenge

The company was experiencing significant operational challenges as a result of having multiple, disparate HCM systems and business processes for its many different properties around the globe.

The problems the company faced included:

Lack of HR process transparency.

Absence of HR self-service capabilities for employees and managers.

No systematic way to transfer employees between properties.

The company therefore decided to implement a global HCM project that would harmonize and integrate its HCM portfolio of more than 50 HR systems and processes for all its hotels and employees, using Workday Core HR cloud software.

How We Helped

Accenture drove the planning, configuration and design of the Workday implementation, overseeing a range of responsibilities that included:

Program management.

Functional process-design and configuration.

Development of in-scope integrations and reports.

Data conversion, testing, and training development.

The work was rolled out in four releases over the course of 15 months for all employees and properties, as Accenture used its established methodology for HR implementations and HR transformations to deliver the effort successfully.

High Performance Delivered

In less than 15 months, the company harmonized its HR processes for all employees at its multiple international properties. In addition, it now had an agile technological foundation at its disposal for future system enhancements.

The project eliminated many of the old HR systems, creating a single system of record with accurate and consistent employee data for some 36,000 users in 36 countries.

Extensive employee and manager self-service capabilities streamlined business processes and improved the efficiency and accuracy of reporting and other HR transactions, such as payroll, compensation and transfers.

Centralizing the HR system also allowed a single, global view of employee and related data, thus enhancing talent-management efforts by making talent data and profiles more accessible.

In addition, the new system permitted integration between local payroll and benefits providers globally and other high-level integrations, including:

ADP—for payroll across all US and Canadian properties.

AON Hewitt—for benefits across all US properties.

Automated payroll integrations to more than 30 individual systems/hotels globally.

Finally, the new system made HR processes more transparent, more visible and easier to understand and use, thereby making compliance more easily achievable.